Netanyahu Throws “Poison Pill” into Gaza Deal as Kushner Meets with Hamas & Israel: Mouin Rabbani

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report.

President Trump’s son-in-law and envoy, Jared Kushner, met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem Monday after Israel rejected a 15-point plan for Gaza promoted by President Trump’s so-called Board of Peace. The proposal would have seen Hamas gradually disarm and turn over governance of the Gaza Strip to an international force in exchange for Israel’s withdrawal.

This is Jared Kushner speaking to Fox News.

JARED KUSHNER: We have a plan to rebuild Gaza, but we will not allow Gaza to be rebuilt until the demilitarization occurs. Nobody wants to put more money into a place that’s gone on for so long, until — if it’s just going to be taken over by terrorists or blown up again.

AMY GOODMAN: Over the weekend, Jared Kushner held rare direct talks in Cairo with Hamas’s political chief, Khalil al-Hayya. Also joining the talks were the Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Qatari, Turkish and Egyptian mediators.

Hamas officials said Israel had violated the terms of the October 2025 ceasefire and that the roadmap agreed to last month was not open to changes. Israel has been conducting near-daily attacks on the Gaza Strip despite the so-called ceasefire, killing more than 1,200 people directly.

For more, we go to Montreal, where we’re joined by Mouin Rabbani, Middle East analyst and managing editor of Jadaliyya. His forthcoming book is titled Gaza Apocalypse.

Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Mouin. Let’s begin with — 

MOUIN RABBANI: Thank you. It’s good to be with you.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s begin with what exactly these meetings have been about and what came out of them, beginning with who Jared Kushner is — again, is not officially a government employee.

MOUIN RABBANI: Yes, I think, as Maggie Haberman was just informing us, he’s actually not part of the government. He has no official role, no official position, and, therefore, is essentially accountable only to his father-in-law, Donald Trump.

He’s also someone who is deeply invested, both literally and figuratively, in the Middle East. He relies, to a very large extent, on funding from Gulf states and connections with various rulers and oligarchs and so on for his business activities, but is also someone who is very deeply, intimately tied to Israel and its imperial project in the region. I mean, you know, his father, the current U.S. ambassador to France, Charles Kushner, and Netanyahu have a long-standing relationship. And at one point when Netanyahu used to visit New York, he would literally sleep in Jared Kushner’s bed.

So, you know, this is all a kind of very incestuous, sordid background for someone to now pretend to play the role of a mediator between two different parties. It’s really not on the cards.

AMY GOODMAN: And when you say “sleep in his bed,” you mean the childhood home of Jared Kushner, he would sleep in his bedroom, right?

MOUIN RABBANI: Well, I recall — I recall Netanyahu, I think, stating that he slept in Kushner’s bed. No suggestion Kushner was in it, as well. This is all pre-Epstein. But, you know, the broader point is there is a very intimate ideological, political connection between the Kushners and Israel. And then there’s, in addition to that, a very intimate, active business and financial connection between Kushner and many of the states in the Gulf.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Axios reported Monday that Hamas leaders had committed to disarming and demilitarizing Gaza. What does that mean in the near time? And can you talk about the significance of Kushner and other Trump officials meeting directly with Hamas?

MOUIN RABBANI: Well, the meeting, the direct meeting, with Hamas is significant, but it’s also not unprecedented. It was unprecedented at the beginning of the Trump administration when its envoy, Adam Boehler, met directly with Hamas officials, including Khalil al-Hayya, in Doha. And this caused such outrage in pro-Israeli circles that Adam Boehler has essentially been politically disappeared.

But to get back to your question, what happened last month is that the Board of Peace, the self-proclaimed Board of Peace, which sees itself essentially as replacing any other international institution and any other international resolutions dealing with the question of Palestine — the Board of Peace put forward a 15-point proposal. That proposal included two key points. The first is the decommissioning of Hamas heavy weaponry, and various other aspects relating to Gaza governance, in which Hamas would have absolutely no role.

But the second point was that none of these commitments would need to be fulfilled unless and until Israel properly fulfilled all its commitments and obligations that it accepted in October of last year pursuant to the ceasefire agreement with Hamas. In other words, Israel would have to stop its daily bombardments and killings in the Gaza Strip and actually observe a cessation of hostilities. It would need to allow the surge of humanitarian goods into the Gaza Strip pursuant to its obligations, and so on.

Israel then objected to this and, acting through the board’s point man on Gaza, the former U.N. envoy Nickolay Mladenov, essentially adopted some key Israeli conditions, thereby revising an agreement that had already been agreed with Hamas. Subsequently, Netanyahu rejected what was, in effect, his own agreement. And I think that move should be seen primarily in terms of the upcoming Israeli parliamentary elections in a few weeks, in two months.

And now Kushner has come to the region. First, he met with Hamas. And rather than reconfirm the validity of the agreement that the board has already reached with the Palestinians, he’s essentially trying to rewrite it. And then, in his — after his meeting with Netanyahu, he came out and emphasized Israel’s — what is called Israel’s right to self-defense, meaning Israel will be under no obligation to observe any commitments regarding a cessation of hostilities. Israel would not be obliged to conduct any of its obligations unless and until Hamas was fully disarmed, meaning it even has to confirm that it no longer has any military infrastructure or even any light personal weapons. Well, this is essentially Israel throwing a poison pill into an agreement by including conditions that can never be met, because Israel can always claim, you know, there is still a Kalashnikov or a pistol or a slingshot, and thereby indefinitely — in other words, permanently — postpone the discharge of any of its own obligations. And you can say Kushner fell for it or Kushner is complicit in this, but the result is the same.

AMY GOODMAN: You have the far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir calling for nightly targeted eliminations of 30 or 40 people in Gaza. Interestingly, a number of news outlets — Associated Press, Financial Times, Times of Israel — are reporting that Ben-Gvir said, “Not just those who pose an immediate threat. There are people there who are not worthy of life. They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people,” making the remarks on a podcast with a former hostage.

MOUIN RABBANI: Yeah, it’s interesting that we have seen Israel’s apologists, particularly in Europe and the United States, rush to dismiss this on the pretext that Netanyahu — that Ben-Gvir is some kind of freelancer who doesn’t really play an important role, and therefore, these explicitly fascist statements, these explicitly genocidal utterances, can be somehow ignored. He is the equivalent of, let’s say, the head of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security or the British home secretary, if not more so. And for him to be making these statements, saying the quiet part out loud, because he knows he can say the quiet part out loud, and he knows there will be absolutely no consequences for making these kinds of statements, I think, you know, that says a lot. And it says even more that he is making these statements in the context of an election campaign, where he is assuming — in my view, correctly — that making such statements probably has an electoral benefit for him, rather than placing him beyond the political pale in what is today Israel.

AMY GOODMAN: Mouin Rabbani, I want to also turn to the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. The White House said Monday it would not seek to extend the MOU, the memorandum of understanding, with Iran, as the 60-day ceasefire deal expired without an agreement to end the war Monday. In Washington, Trump called on Tehran to, quote, “put up the white flag of surrender.” And at the same time, you have President Trump threatening Oman, reportedly threatening to bomb the — rhymes with “hit” — out of Oman if it, quote, “gets in the way” of the U.S. blockade of Iranian ships in the Strait of Hormuz, when it is no — it has not been secret that Oman is negotiating with Iran to open the strait.

MOUIN RABBANI: Well, you know, this also ties into the previous part of our discussion. We are not only dealing with an exceptionally bad-faith actor in Israel, but we are dealing with the United States, whose statements, whose commitments are — whose agreements are completely unreliable, untrustworthy. We’re dealing with an impetuous leader who will talk out of both sides of his mouth, as in this case, threaten a close ally for performing its role of seeking to promote diplomacy.

Look, no one expected that the 60-day term of the Iranian-U.S. memorandum of understanding would result in a comprehensive agreement. I think many people, myself included, did think that at the end of this period, the U.S. and Iran would jointly agree to extend the term of the memorandum of understanding to give diplomacy a chance. But I think at at this point we have to assume that a renewed full-scale military confrontation between Iran, on the one hand, and the U.S. and Israel, on the other, looks increasingly likely, if not inevitable. And that is the product of the, you know, crazy decision by Trump, which you discussed previously with Maggie Haberman, to launch this war in the first place.

AMY GOODMAN: And then, back on Jared Kushner with Gaza, as they talk about the new Gaza and the new Rafah, and they talk about making the first contract for Moroccan soldiers to come into Gaza to cordon off that area? We just have a minute.

MOUIN RABBANI: Well, again, you know, the decommissioning of Hamas heavy weaponry that was agreed in this 15-point plan was supposed to take place under Palestinian and international auspices. We’re now talking about the total disarmament of Hamas directly under American auspices — a poison pill.

And regarding your question about these Moroccan soldiers, you know, we had been talking about an 8,000-man stabilization force, but no one wants to be part of this, because no one knows what the details are. No one knows what the objectives are, and the plan keeps changing. And therefore, I think it’s essentially a dead letter.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Mouin Rabbani, we will, of course, continue to follow this. Thank you so much for being with us, Middle East — 

MOUIN RABBANI: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: — analyst and managing editor of Jadaliyya, his forthcoming book titled Gaza Apocalypse.

That does it for our show. I’ll be in Middlebury, Vermont, on August 28th to speak after the screening of Tia Lessin and Carl Deal’s film about Democracy Now! called Steal This Story, Please!, then in Madison, Wisconsin, on September 5th, in Chicago on September 6th, and then in Bay Shore, New York, on September 17th. You can go to our website at democracynow.org for the screenings and the Q&A afterwards. I’m Amy Goodman. This is another edition of Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report.

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